Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Bamboo was the source of inspiration for the slender and tapering form and the random tilting. The tapering form is a truncated cone. This type of cone can be modeled geometrically by lofting two circles with different radii. Since each column varies in length, using the same circles with the same radii for all the columns will make a unique truncated cone for each column. This is evidently undesirable in terms of cost.

This led to an idea in mass-customisation and fabrication: the Unit-length column. Given a set of columns of varying lengths, find the longest length and use it to make the Unit-length column. Columns of shorter lengths can be produced by cutting the tip of the Unit-length column.